La Laguna comparte experiencias en accesibilidad con Grecia
The City Council of La Laguna will participate next week in a European cooperation event with the Greek city of Komotiní, which has shown interest in the numerous advancements and achievements that the municipality has made in areas such as disability and universal accessibility, leading to numerous international recognitions. This activity is part of the CIVITAS project, a European Union co-financed initiative in which over 70 localities across the continent participate.
A team of technical staff from the areas of Social Welfare and Quality of Life, as well as Works, Accessibility, and Infrastructures, will travel next week to Greek lands to hold different work meetings, exchange experiences, and visit various infrastructures that require comprehensive action, using the work carried out by the La Laguna Corporation in its public spaces as a model.
The Councilor of Works, Accessibility, and Infrastructures of the City Council, Ángel Chinea, will take part in this initiative «which will involve comprehensive advice for creating accessible services, the rehabilitation of urban environments to make them accessible to all sectors of the population, and the intervention in other spaces to combine heritage beauty and functionality.»
On the other hand, the Councilor of Social Welfare and Quality of Life, María Cruz, highlighted «the pride that La Laguna feels in assuming this role of a mentor city that Europe has entrusted to us to support Komotiní in this transformation process, from which we can also learn good practices and actions that can be transferred to our territory to improve our facilities and services.»
This exchange of ideas and field visits next week will be combined with other virtual meetings to monitor the project, as well as joint training workshops, communication advice activities, and visibility of accessibility as an added value, and other participatory evaluations of pilot projects.
The main aspects that Komotiní has shown interest in are the essential services for people with disabilities provided in La Laguna, such as sign language interpreters, easy reading texts, specific guided routes, QR codes, orange points, sensory backpacks, and interpreter guides for deafblind individuals, among other services.
In the urban and historical district design aspects, there are significant similarities between both cities, so the Greek city has many possibilities to extrapolate the adaptation and rehabilitation model of La Laguna’s structures to its main road, thus guaranteeing the removal of physical barriers and the global opening of its most emblematic buildings.
